Health care has been a major political issue for many years, and is still a major topic of discussion on the presidential platforms today. What becomes of this will affect all of us in our daily lives.

The following are contrasting ideas on if we should have a government-run health care system or not. The U.S. health care nonsystem is inhuman and inefficient. Among major Western industrialized nations only the U.S. and South Africa do not uphold the principle that health is a human right. The major political and medical establishments say we have neither the resources nor the popular will to make the commitment to health a human right. Both arguments are wrong.

The problem is clearly not the lack of recourses. What this argument ignores is that we already spend more on health care than any other nation on earth. Nearly 11 percent of our GNP is spent on health services, making the health sector the third largest economic activity in the nation. In spite of these enormous expenditures, we still have many problems with our health system. Today one child dies of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition on average of every fifteen minutes. Three million families were refused medical care in 1986 because they could not pay for it.

Health costs are the major cause of personal bankruptcy. These are not only minority problems, they are majority problems.

Other countries offer more comprehensive and universal health care coverage and have better health indicators and more popular health services than ours, and cost much less than ours do. Great Britain, for example, with 5.6 percent of its GNP spent on health services, offers comprehensive and universal health coverage, with 85 percent of the British people pleased with their health services. A somewhat similar situation exists in Canada. In the US., we spend almost double what Great Britain does, but still 16 percent of our population doesn't have any form of health coverage and the majority of our citizens still pay directly for large amounts of their health bills. Not surprisingly, 72 percent of our population feel that the U.S. health care system needs profound changes. And 62 percent favor a national health program, even if the establishment of this program would call for higher taxes (which it would not). A lot of profits and obscenely high salaries are being made from sick people. The greedy are indeed exploiting the needy. Much of these profits and expenditures are both unnecessary and harmful. The interest groups that benefit from such greed and waste will oppose changes. And their political influence is enormous.

The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Mike Giocondo, "Private enterprise in health care is keeping many people away from the care and treatment they need. Medical costs are today beyond the reach of not only the poor, but also those in the middle income bracket. There are some 37 million people in the country without medical insurance. The only thing to do is to make it a public system, where everyone who needs care will get it. Everyone has a right to proper care and a healthy life."

The reason for supporting a national health program are fairly straight forward: (1) it is the moral and principled thing to do - the U.S. has to join the rest of the civilizations and recognize that health is a human right; (2) it makes sense; and (3) people want it.

Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that too much government control diminishes the quality of care and produces even higher costs. Medicare and medicaid are the closest thing the United States has to a national health insurance, and the expense of these programs provide the best argument against a more extensively socialized health system. In addition, countries with national health insurance invariably resort to rationing schemes which treat people in a discriminatory way and cause long waiting lines for treatment. In such countries, the quality of care declines and medicine becomes more impersonal, more routine and more bureaucratized.

In most cases, when more money becomes available for a product or a service, the price of that good or service rises. Private health insurance was the first booster of health care costs. That's because true economics is nothing more than human nature in action. If the insurance company, not the patient, nor doctor, nor hospital has any incentive to keep the cost down. It's no good to posture and moralize. Patients, doctors, hospital administrators, and health insurance companies are all on an equal moral plane in this regard for not even the insurance companies cared about costs as long as they could keep upping the premiums. Medicaid and Medicare, which are nothing more than government health insurance, acted like a match to a rocket fuse. With billions available, billions were billed.

Although substantial socialization has taken place, the medical community can stop this trend and help shape a better health care system for the future. It is not enough, however, for those of us associated with the medical community only to oppose what we do not like. We also should take the lead in offering positive solutions. The alternative is to yield to more government control and the weakening of a system that, despite its problems, has been the best ever known by mankind.

The following are the pros and cons of rationing health care for the elderly. Some experts calculate that we spend ten times more per capita of the federal budget on the elderly than on our children. If we have idle assets, why not do something about the 37 million Americans who were refused even basic health care? Or about the 20 percent of our children who haven't yet been given polio shots? Or about the one-third of all pregnant women who have had no health care in their first trimester? The federal government pays 50 percent of the health care costs of the elderly. This may not be enough, but it is far more than for any other demographic group, and the elderly have the highest disposable income. While the nations' borrowing costs are soaring, is it fair to put a new entitlement program for the elderly on the national credit card? The following is an excerpt from an article by Daniel Callahan. "I think we would be justified in saying that beyond a certain age we will simply not provide expensive, life-extending care. We will always relieve your pain and suffering, but we will not give you organ transplantations, we will not give you access to open-heart surgery, or even possibly access to an intensive-care unit. We will really say: Look, we have already done justice to you in our society by getting you this far. And we cannot be asked to indefinitely extend your life." Less emphasis should be put on the elderly and more emphasis on the younger children.

To assume that the elderly may use up only that percentage of medical costs that is equal to their percentage of the total population is a misuse of statistics. We don't insist the entire education budget be prorated over all cohorts in the population. Does (Callahan's) projection of future health costs take the expense of fighting acquired immune deficiency syndrome into account? AIDS is not a disease of the elderly, yet we do not begrudge that expense. The retort is from Ruth Sperber. HMO and Medicare competition are both much hotter. A lot of companies look at different insurance plans and change employees' benefits every year. For the employee, that means all new coverage and finding a new doctor. That's fine if you're 20 years old and healthy but not if you're 55 with heart problems. s There are many problems facing us concerning health care. This essay lets you understand some aspects of the many different areas of health care, and lets you form your own opinions based on some of the facts you have read.

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